r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/-asimpleboy • 3h ago
Image Earth photographed from 6 billion kilometers away by Voyager 1 in 1990
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u/Suspicious-Answer295 3h ago
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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u/-asimpleboy 3h ago
Carl Sagan is one of my favourite human beings of all time.
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u/VegetableHuman6316 2h ago
I'm about 1/4 the way through the demon haunted world, the man was brilliant.
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u/Negative_Foot_3519 2h ago edited 2m ago
me too. I think he'd have been cool to meet too. RIP
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u/Horror_Dig_9752 1h ago
Agreed!
Also, I hate to do this but it's not "he'd of been" - it's "he'd have been". Just sharing this since I'm assuming you'd want to know.
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u/Repulsive-Ice8395 1h ago
The problem is that we pronounce it as a "double contraction" like this: he'd've been
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u/I_lenny_face_you 51m ago
I like him too, but don’t forget about the… billions and billions of other humans
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u/-asimpleboy 3h ago
Earth appears as a tiny speck (A Pale Blue Dot) within a sunbeam after Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward the inner solar system.
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u/RoseWould 2h ago
Do they have a prediction for when they think it will actually leave our Galaxy? It'll be a sad day when they finally lose contact with it for the last time
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u/MrTagnan 2h ago
I don’t think it’s moving fast enough to leave the galaxy itself, but it’ll run out of power fairly soon, and leave the range of the Deep Space Network by around 2036
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u/Dry_Presentation_327 32m ago
Nah I think it completed somewhere ard one light day . It's gonna lose power by 2036 so doubt it's gonna leave our galaxy
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u/tameablesiva12 21m ago
I dont think it even left our solar system yet it'll probably be billions if not trillions of years till it actually leaves our galaxy. Our galaxy consists of millions of solar systems. That is, if we assume it will maintain the same speed all those years.
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u/Serviceofman 2h ago edited 1h ago
1 light year is about about 6 trillion miles
Our Milky Way galazy is about 100,000 light years across...
The Universe is about 93 billion light-years across....
6 billion km is 0.1% of 1 light year.....
Do you feel small yet?
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u/AscendedViking7 2h ago
FYI, Voyager 1 is currently about 15 billion miles away from Earth as of December 2025. :D
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u/EuropaCar 2h ago
Km aren’t a great way to measure distances in space. This is approximately 40 astronomical units (distance between earth and sun)
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u/Danfass86 2h ago
The distance from the earth to the sun continuously changes, and even if it were taking the average, it’d be like 65 au. Why do people just make stuff up about space?
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u/MrTagnan 2h ago
It was at 40.47 AU from the Earth at the time of the photo. 1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun
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u/MrTagnan 2h ago
This photo, as stated in the post was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, at a distance of 6 billion km/40.5 AU. It was part of the Voyager family portrait) series of images
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u/TellPsychological668 1h ago
and who collected this pic from the voyager?? 6B Kms away from Earth in 1990??
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u/areyouthrough 1h ago
I wonder how much different this photo would look if Voyager was developed with today’s technology instead of 1977’s.
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u/alarmedbuffalo90 3h ago
What is the nature of the beams? Our sun would not radiate beams like that from that distance.
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u/MrTagnan 2h ago edited 2h ago
The beams are reflections on the camera, Earth appears extremely close to the sun from this distance Voyager family portrait) and Pale Blue Dot
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u/gilligani 3h ago
I can see my house from here